Likewise with tomorrow. I was supposed to catch the Card out of Cincinnati tomorrow night (Friday morning) but it was canceled. Truly a bummer because I was looking forward to riding that route for the first time. Flying to Boston and then taking a bus to New York instead now

NIMBYkiller wrote:Likewise with tomorrow. I was supposed to catch the Card out of Cincinnati tomorrow night (Friday morning) but it was canceled. Truly a bummer because I was looking forward to riding that route for the first time. Flying to Boston and then taking a bus to New York instead now

I've been on this route a few times and you didn't miss much compared to some others. Lots of it in the dark, lots of it slow. That said I've never rode the east end where the mountains are, just Chicago to Indy, Cinci, and West Virginia. The Indy leg is truly forgettable. For point-to-point NYC-Chicago, the Lakeshore is far better ride.

Maybe the institutional memory is gone. Sometime in the late 1960's I rode a 19-car non-HEP City of Everywhere across Wyoming in bitter cold; there was a steam-generator car on the rear, and everything worked fine. (Of course there wasn't a polar vortex at the time.)

Amtrak seems to have lost interest in being an important public service. There was a time, pre-Amtrak, when railroads advertised that in bad weather, when highways were icy and planes couldn't fly, you could depend on trains. Also, railroads accommodated standees. It appears that since most Amtrak trains require reservations, standees won't be allowed nowadays.

There are some legitimate problems that Amtrak has, compared to pre-Amtrak railroads. One thing is that all railroads operate with vastly fewer employees than back in the day, so there are not many people available to shovel snow, etc. And, if roads are closed, the employees may have trouble getting to work. (Would the police help these vital crew members? I don't know.)

But the most basic problem is that Amtrak's management seems to have little interest in actually running useful train service. So, they don't try to solve these problems, such as by putting crew up in hotels and hiring temp snow shovelers. I don't know if Mr Anderson is part of the problem but it certainly existed before his tenure.

That last paragraph is particularly pertinent. I know that the LIRR, when severe weather Is predicted, rents blocks of hotel space around Jamaica so that personnel can be based there until ordinary travel is again possible; I think this practice is typical of commuter rail operations generally.

Agree with everything above, AMTK not a reliable form of transport in bad weather, would have thought with HEP and elec heat its trains would be fairly cold weather proof. Remember a time in the late 60’s riding the DZ across Nebraska in winter, dome lounge got cold, in Lincoln a steam generator equipped SD9 hooked on to rear and thawed frozen lines. Q knew how to run passenger trains.

ExCon90 wrote:That last paragraph is particularly pertinent. I know that the LIRR, when severe weather Is predicted, rents blocks of hotel space around Jamaica so that personnel can be based there until ordinary travel is again possible; I think this practice is typical of commuter rail operations generally.

CSX would have MARC crews hang out in one of DC's hotels until the next shift. I would think Bombardier would pick that up as well.